Canada’s favourite soft-boiled detective, Benny Cooperman, is a little worse for wear in Memory Book, the 11th instalment of this popular series.But fans will be pleased that he has been able to return at all after his creator, Howard Engel, suffered a stroke in 2001. Engel now suffers from alexia sine agraphia: he can still write but he cannot read. Despite this nightmarish condition, he has written one of the best Benny Cooperman mysteries yet. (Oliver Sacks concurs, and offers more details in an afterword about alexia and how it has affected Engel.)

This novel differs from others in the series because Benny is different. He still has the Cooperman patter and wise-cracking personality, but Engel has decided to share his condition with his alter ego. Memory Book begins with Benny waking up in a Toronto hospital, where he is informed that he suffers from alexia sine agraphia, courtesy of a vicious blow to the back of his head. The mystery is how and why Benny came to receive this blow. The questions are endless because Benny can’t remember any of the events leading up to his injury or the eight weeks he’s already spent in the hospital. When he learns that he was discovered in a dumpster beside a dead woman, he has to find out what happened.

Memory Book has the feel of a drawing-room mystery since, aside from one short excursion, Cooperman is confined to the hospital. His good friend Anna Abraham helps him with some fieldwork, but otherwise he works the phone (after he recalls just how to do that) and questions those who come to him.

Engel does a masterful job of putting us inside Benny’s confused head and letting us puzzle over the clues at his pace. It’s occasionally claustrophobic in Benny’s woolly mind, but it’s an intriguing perspective from which to solve a crime. And the solution is satisfying and not easy to discern before Benny, with the help of the police, reveals all at the end of the book.